They found the doctor still at work, late into the night beneath a lone, insect-spotted, forty-watt bulb. He worked with a single assistant. Tejani and Kai waited in silence until he was ready for them. A small man, who seemed uncomfortable in his skin and baffled by their visit, though gracious enough. Kai remembered seeing a picture of him some time later, at an awards ceremony for his work, wearing an outsize suit and the same expression of bafflement, surrounded by European faces. Two images of him: that one, which came later, and the first, of him working on the other side of the room, handling samples of contaminated matter, wearing a snorkel and mask, and a pair of household rubber gloves.
In those days they had learned to make do. Throughout the whole of their medical training, it had been the same. One would perform a procedure, the others watch. It has become part of him, this lack of need. And there is always a fly. So they decide to proceed, as they always do. Time in the operating theatre is marked out in precious minutes.
The amputation patient is lying on the table, arms outstretched, one arm hooked up to the blood-pressure monitor, the other to a line into which the nurse is pumping ketamine. He is strapped to the table to prevent him moving should he begin to hallucinate. Kai has seen a patient try to stand up in the middle of a procedure, heard another talk to his dead mother. Tejani had written to him of nightclubs in America where people lay in darkened rooms, knocked out on ketamine. During the war commanders had given the drug to child combatants just before they sent them into battle.
In this most recent letter, Kai thinks he detects a new mood of confidence. Tejani’s letters of the first two years have been full of laments. It has been Kai’s job to reassure him. Now, for the first time, something different. Come, Tejani is saying to his old friend. Come. The word acts upon him all day, making him restless, like a grain of sand between skin and shirt.
Kai swabs the area where the first incision will be made with a mixture of water, iodine and ampicillin.
Seligmann, the Canadian surgeon whom Kai is assisting, is ready to begin.
‘Cutting now.’
Kai closes his eyes and opens them. He breathes in, lets all the sounds behind him fall away, all except the voices of the team and the sound of the instruments.
CHAPTER 11
A photograph.
‘I had Babagaleh bring this in. I hadn’t seen it myself for years. It was among the things we were packing up a few weeks ago.’
The garden, a vast sweep of foliage, seems to merge with the sky, heavy black-and-white clouds, brightened by a glint of silver, like far-off lightning. By contrast, beneath his hat the face of the man in the pale suit is shadowed. Adrian can see, though, that it is Elias Cole. Elias Cole thirty years ago.
*
I think it would be wrong to say I ever followed Saffia. In conversation the names of places she liked to visit or where she did her shopping might arise. Later, I might jot the detail down in my notebook. And if I happened to find myself there at any of those times, naturally I would look to see if she happened to be there also. Sometimes I might say hello. Other times, I thought it better not to intrude on her thoughts. I might have watched her from a distance. That was all.
In Victoria Park I saw her walking towards the library carrying a small pile of books shadowed by the shambling figure of a lunatic. I stepped up alongside her and shooed him away.
‘Oh, Elias! You frightened me.’ And then when she saw the man with his matted hair and beard, thick curling fingernails, she said, ‘Oh, there’s no harm in him.’ She reached into her handbag and found a few cents. ‘Come. Come.’
The man edged closer, keeping me in the periphery of his vision, until he was close enough to reach out and take the coin from Saffia. He smelled appallingly of piss.
‘Thank you, Ma. God bless you,’ and he bowed and retreated, somewhat as a waiter might.
‘All the same you should be careful,’ I said when he had gone.
We walked on, passing the statue of the British queen, along the pathways of cracked concrete. She lowered her chin, smiling to herself.
‘Look at this. Have you seen this before?’ She reached up, bent down a stem of bougainvillea, its head crowded with papery petals. ‘See. Three different colours. No, four. On the same shrub. There are a few like this on campus, too. Have you ever noticed? Somebody took a great deal of trouble once upon a time.’
We reached the library steps. There she stopped and half turned towards me, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun.
I groaned and smacked my forehead with my palm. ‘Oh, no! Excuse me, please. I hope he hasn’t let it go. A volume by Sayer. The library copy has been out for weeks. Missing, probably. You’d be amazed what you can find at the second-hand stalls down here.’
She smiled. ‘I must take a look one of these days.’ She raised her free hand. ‘Well, let me not keep you.’
At the top of the stairs she turned around and caught me watching her, lowered her head and quickly pushed through the revolving doors. I turned, walked past the second-hand bookstalls without stopping and made my way home.
The first thing to go, in matters of this kind, is judgement. I yearned for her. I lived in constant frustration. As soon as one meeting was over, I began to plan where and when the next might occur.
It is true to say no woman had ever produced such a restlessness in me. I had never been in love. Once or twice I’d whispered the words, idly, to certain women. Always in the moments before the act of love itself. But I knew, if I had not known before, that the affection I had felt for those creatures was like comparing the pleasure of a summer’s day to the terror of a storm. I was lost in the darkness amid thunder, blinding flashes, the madness of the wind. I was caught up in a tempest, I had lost all sense of direction. If Saffia found my appearance in various places unusual, she had never commented upon it. This single fact I now allowed to lend a recklessness to my warped judgement.
Friday. Four days after our meeting in Victoria Park. I stood at the side of the road and watched the people pass in groups on their way to the mosque. It had just stopped raining, the sky was pale and clear, stripped bare. The voices of the passers-by rang out, lent clarity by the purity of the air. Nobody paid me much attention. After a few minutes the door to the pink house opened and the crone stepped out and paused there for a moment, framed by the darkness of the hall. Swaddled in green cloth, her prayer beads entwined in her head covering, she tweaked the folds of her gown, tightened the grip on her purse and launched herself down the street. I watched her figure dwarf in the distance, then I crossed the street and knocked at the door.
Saffia regarded me in silence for several moments.
‘Hello, Elias,’ a note in her voice, of weariness or caution. She did not open the door, but held on to the handle.
‘I’m sorry. I woke you. You were sleeping, perhaps.’
‘No, no,’ hurriedly, for I dare say Saffia couldn’t stomach such a notion of herself as the kind of woman who slept in the afternoon.
‘Then you were on your way out.’
She wore a simple house dress and at that she glanced down at it. Quite plainly she was going nowhere. In the end she had no option but to move aside. ‘Come in, Elias.’ Her tone was less than welcoming, but I did not let that stop me, as perhaps I should have. ‘I don’t have very long. I have to go into town,’ she lied. Not a natural liar, too vague, too slow off the mark.
I sat in my customary chair on the verandah. Even dressed as she was in a loose house dress, a batik design of greys and greens, her hair in plain braids, no woman I had ever met could match her beauty. The telephone rang and she went to answer it. Her voice drifted back to me and I listened to her end of the conversation, trying to work out who she was speaking to. Whoever it was I was jealous of them, of the presumption they owned in calling her whenever they pleased.
In front of me, the sky, vast and empty. Pools of water had gathered in the garden and were beginning to hum with insect life. The rains had set
the frogs off, like a chorus of drunks. Solitary drops fell from the ends of the leaves and from somewhere the sound of running water. When Saffia returned to the verandah she did not offer me coffee or a glass of water, she sat down and placed her hands in her lap. I was tempted to ask her who’d been on the telephone; instead I said something about the garden, something vaguely complimentary, about its appearance after the rain.
‘Except for the Harmattan lilies,’ she responded. She was happiest talking about her garden. ‘They prefer the dry. It’s the end of the season for them.’
There came the sound of the door and of somebody entering the house. I thought it was Julius even though I had left him in my office less than an hour before. He was in the habit now of using it when he pleased. The door swung open. I steeled myself. Saffia jumped up and hurried across the sitting room.
‘Auntie? What have you forgotten? Let me fetch it for you.’
Not Julius then, but the crone, muttering and shuffling past Saffia on her way to her room. Saffia followed her, placing her body between the woman and the verandah where I was sitting, hovering outside the woman’s door. In time the woman emerged and, as she did so, seemed to catch sight of me, for she stopped, turned and shuffled forward, peering through the glass. I nodded to her, but if she noticed she ignored me. I heard her say something to Saffia, I can’t tell you what, because I didn’t, don’t speak their language, but it was all there, in the scolding tone. Saffia closed the door behind her and stood holding on to the handle, her back to me.
When she returned she had withdrawn from me further still. My visit had become untenable. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. What I did next I did out of desperation. It wasn’t what I wanted. I’d imagined it differently, over lunch or in a café, perhaps. Or in the dark hollows of a garden, at a party, left alone for a few minutes. Or walking side by side through Victoria Park. Not the Victoria Park of madmen, beggars and second-hand books salesmen. Another Victoria Park, peopled by students reading in the shade of the frangipani trees and couples like ourselves, one that existed only in the landscape of my imagination.
I had no idea when I would next get the chance to be alone with her. I panicked. I reached out my hand and would have touched her arm, had she not risen swiftly to her feet.
‘Forgive me, Elias, I really must get ready to go.’
Some days later I was in my office. Julius entered. It did me no good at all to see him.
‘Cole, Cole, Cole.’ He was shaking his head. ‘My wife …’ And he wagged his finger at me.
I confess it gave me a jolt, but then I saw he was grinning. I forced myself to smile back, and to greet him. I could hear my voice, cracked and hollow.
‘Oh, Cole, Cole,’ he said. ‘My wife is very upset with me. She asked me to give you this a long while back. And I forgot all about it. I’ve had to beg her forgiveness.’
He placed upon my desk an envelope, yellow with black squares, of the kind you get when you have a film developed. And inside – the images of me, taken at their house the day of my first visit.
So she had told him. Julius had known all the time.
He sat, perched on the edge of my desk; by then he was talking about something else. I forced myself into the appearance of listening. I was distantly aware of him punching my shoulder, of the door closing behind him. I murmured something, I let him go. I sat still, gazing at the surface of my desk. I felt a flicker of something burning in my bowels. Not dislike, it was impossible to dislike a man like Julius. Not dislike, then. A small flicker of hate.
CHAPTER 12
An evening, Friday, Adrian waits for Kai. It is early still and the bar is close to empty. His beer, a local brand, is gassy and pale. Adrian watches the other customers: a pair of African men, friends of the bartender, a small group of expatriate men at the bar. Two local girls keep company with the expats.
A trail of sea air reaches him through the other, darker odours. The beer is his second on an empty stomach. As Adrian looks around his eyes come to rest on one of the women. She is wearing a purple top, leaning her body against the man in front of her, her head over his shoulder. Of her companion Adrian can see little more than an expanse of back, a striped shirt, a tanned forearm. The woman is pretty by any standards, resting against the man with feline languor. Adrian watches her, mentally positions himself in place of the man against whose chest she leans, imagines the feel of her breasts, and wonders what it would be like to have sex with her. He takes a moment to speculate how such a thing might be managed. Would he come here alone, wait for her to approach him? Sit at the bar, perhaps?
Now he realises that she has shifted her gaze and is looking directly at him. She holds his eyes unabashed. A long, dark, opaque stare. Embarrassed, Adrian turns away.
Adrian has spent the better part of the morning at the mental hospital talking to the attendants and staff, those who might have more information on the woman patient. Accompanied at first by Salia, he had eventually managed to persuade the nurse to leave him to his own devices.
From the staff and from the hospital records, Adrian learned there was a pattern to the woman’s admissions. Loosely speaking they occurred every six or seven months. On each occasion she’d been found wandering. Hardly extraordinary in a country where so much of the population had been displaced, still the woman had been brought to the hospital by a stranger or strangers, whose names had sometimes but not always been recorded. Her psychiatric records were neatly kept though scant. No more luck, either, with the ward notes. The attendants had little in the way of formal training. Adrian had spoken to them all, careful to show due deference. A few more details had emerged. Once she had been found outside the gutted ruin of a department store. Twice she’d been examined by the visiting physician, who found her to be in good physical health. No evidence of substance abuse or epilepsy. Her sojourns at the hospital lasted a few days, two weeks at most, and concluded, Adrian was surprised to read, with a self-discharge on each occasion. Her name was Agnes.
When he was as satisfied as he could be, Adrian had gone along to the women’s ward. It was lunchtime. An attendant stood in the middle of the ward ladling rice out of steel vats on to plastic plates. The women moved forward, forming a semicircle around the trolley. From the other side of the room a woman crossed the floor with a stiff-legged gait, the Thorazine shuffle. A long time now since Adrian had seen it. In the trembling hands of others, he recognised, too, the side effects of Haldol. Agnes was sitting on the edge of her bed, holding the plate in her left hand, eating carefully with her right hand, wrist held high, delicately gathering the food with her fingers. He noticed she didn’t lick her fingers clean like most of the others, but poured water over them into a basin from a plastic kettle by the side of her bed.
Adrian approached her from where she could see him. She gave no indication of having heard him. He positioned himself so that he was standing in front of her, leaving her no choice but to look at him.
‘I am Dr Lockheart.’ Not strictly true, but he’d learned how it worked here. She looked up unblinking, the light of her eyes unchanged, either by recognition, or confusion. ‘Come,’ he said, and indicated to her to stand up. He turned and walked away, slowly at first, until he felt her following.
‘Do you know who I am?’ Adrian was sitting in Ileana’s chair, the woman opposite him. Salia had come to act as interpreter. Now he put Adrian’s words into Creole. They had discussed this already; if the woman was from the city she would understand. If she was from elsewhere Salia might or might not be able to help.
Agnes sat, curled upon herself. She offered no answer.
‘Can you tell me your own name?’
She was silent still, though she had moved her head slightly at the sound of his voice. Her fingers worried at a loose thread in her dress. He repeated the question. This time there came a sound, a murmuring, as though she was trying out sounds. In this way she failed to answer any of the basic questions Adrian put to her. The date, day or time, a
knowledge of where she was. He watched her carefully, the sideways motion of the head, the pauses in the plucking of the thread. He gathered an impression that she was at some level computing the questions. She hadn’t yet looked at him.
‘Do you know how you came to be here?’ She looked up, rolling her head back on her shoulders, and gazed somewhere into the space between him and Salia leaning against the window ledge. A dark line appeared between her eyebrows, her breathing quickened momentarily. She rubbed her hand across her face.
‘Did you come here on your own or did somebody bring you?’
The plucking stopped and started again furiously. Adrian paused, aware of Salia watching from the sidelines. All this would be reported straight back to Attila, for sure. Agnes’s fingernails were trimmed, he observed, her hair was neatly braided. Either somebody did these things for her, or she did them herself. He doubted anybody in this place was responsible for such a degree of care.
He altered his tone to one of brisk impersonality. ‘Can you count your fingers for me?’ She looked down at her hands and moved the fingers one by one.
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